This Japanese Firm Will Make The World’s First Artificial Meteor Shower

For dedicated skywatchers, meteor showers are one of the most exciting events. However, it’s hard to predict when they’ll take place, and the weather affects the capability of watching the sky. Naturally, meteor shows occur due to streams of meteoroids that simultaneously enter the Earth’s atmosphere at extremely high speeds. Mostly, meteors are smaller than a grain of sand, which integrate into the air and never hit the surface.

Now, a Japanese firm has come up with a solution: artificial meteor showers.

Astro Live Experience (ALE) based in Tokyo called itself a pioneer regarding the field of space entertainment. The company launched its own custom satellite on Thursday morning with the hope to create an artificial meteor shower in 2020. The world’s first meteor shower will take place near Hiroshima, where up to six million people from 200km around can observe the event.

ALE designed this satellite to test its idea of man-made meteor showers as well as collect data for further development and refinement of the product. It’s also on the work with a second satellite.

Rendering of an artificial meteor shower over Japan

Lena Okajima, ALE CEO, said that the product, hopefully, would help entertain people and reveal new scientific discoveries.

According to ALE, the satellite carries non-toxic pallets with the one-centimeter diameter that it will fire off over the sky. When heated up, the “particles,” as the company calls, will generate a range of bright colors and disintegrate while falling back to the atmosphere. The process is designed to happen at a 60-kilometer distance, and the mix of materials to make the pallets is proprietary.

How ALE creates a meteor shower

Compared with natural meteors, ALE’s particles are expected to travel more slowly, glow for a longer time, and display enough brightness so that even the most heavily light-polluted city like Tokyo can observe the show.

ALE launched its first satellite at 9:50AM Thursday local time (4:50PM PT Wed). Carrying the satellite was the Epsilon Rocket made by JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency). The rocket also carried six other satellites at that same time.